Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi

Author:Zainab Salbi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

My favorite new university friend was a Kurdish girl named Lana, the daughter of hardworking professional parents. We were together on campus one day when another student made a silly joke about the vice president, Ezzet Al-Douree. Another quickly hushed her, pointed at my earring as if it were a secret recording device, and started singing one of the patriotic songs we had learned in school. “May God protect the president!” she sang, using the chant like an amulet to ward off evil. “May God prolong his life!” The others laughed at the joke, but I couldn’t. I was more afraid of them than they were of me. I wanted so badly just to tell them how I really felt, but I couldn’t, and I knew I never could. That was the way informers worked. They played Devil’s advocate and got you to say something you weren’t supposed to. I knew I wasn’t an informer, but as I looked around that day, I realized that one of my new friends might well be. So I buried my feelings and stayed silent, letting them think what they would.

One of the things I liked about Lana was that she found it hard to filter her emotions. She was one of the three or four students I was friendly with whose homes I was able to visit, and we were sitting on her bed one day studying for an exam when she leaned over and whispered very fast in my ear.

“Zainab, I have to tell you a secret,” she said. “It’s so awful! The government dropped chemical weapons on the Kurds in the north and thousands and thousands of people are dead. They just fell where they were standing. A whole town was killed in a matter of minutes.”

She told me what she had heard, and pictures flashed across my mind of Kurdish families fallen in narrow streets, children heaped on one another, babies without breath, in their mothers’ dead arms, a whole village of people inhaling gas so poisonous they died while they were moving. A father was found dead with his children around the kitchen table, killed in the middle of a meal, as they were eating. I heard her describe these awful things, and yet I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t say anything to her at all. I just went stiff, and I remember her almost jumping backward on the bed at my silence. I always suspected she reacted that way because she suddenly remembered she was talking to the daughter of a “friend” of Saddam’s.

We both looked back at our books and made a pretense of resuming study of our English composition. But later, when I was alone, the images kept assaulting me, a hail of arrows shooting over the walls I had built up around that part of my brain that I had hidden off so I wouldn’t have to think about the horrendous things Amo was doing to his own people. Thousands of people died? Thousands? Lana probably had relatives in the Kurdish region, so she must have heard it from someone there.

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